Ten things that make me feel human are eating, sleeping, learning, loving, thinking, feeling, working, relaxing, talking and expressing myself.

I feel like I should engage with my audience for many reasons. One of the main reasons is to educate people about higher education.  I also want to educate people about the reasons why people don’t go to higher education.

I will engage with my audience with interesting questions and try to get the most useful information from them.  I will engage with my readers with interest information and results drawn from my data.

I must engage with the people I interview and my readers alike.

The challenges I care about is how to connect and make my readers feel comfortable with me.   If they aren’t comfortable with you as a person, they won’t want to tell you sensitive information.  I also have to overcome to challenges of time management.  People’s schedules can be hectic and there may be complications to set up interviews.  The opportunities that I should care about is the opportunities to diversify my sample of students.  People tend to gravitate towards similar people so I will take opportunities in my life to meet new people.  The new people I meet I will try to incorporate them into my research.  I should take a gentle approach and not force the person to be uncomfortable.  When the person is uncomfortable it will be difficult to obtain the correct information.

 

My epitaph might read

“As I dream of a better world

What does that actually mean?

Mean what it shall, makes no difference to me.

As I continue to doubt everything I see.

Whatever that means.”

Please don’t read too much into it. I just see big laws protecting the environment being enacted but I’m still seeing the effects of climate change.

 

Based on your life experience, skills and interests I feel like my design process has to be data-driven.
I personally believe data is beautiful.
I want to quantify data that usually isn’t quantifiable. In an ideal world, I would mix ethnography with the scientific method but currently, I’m having trouble figuring it out. I would design an ethnographic response with a good analysis of data. Plus, some graphs that my derive meaning.
There are more than three stakeholders in my study. I feel whoever reads my work is a stakeholder. In this case, I’ll group all readers as one group. The five unique attributes of the readers that they must be interested in the content, be motivated to learn, must want benefit from the knowledge, must value learning and want to benefit their own life by learning more. The second main stakeholder is me. The categories of my five unique attributes of myself are my demographics, socioeconomics and geographic. These are the attributes that are ranked from most important to least important: ethnicity, income, social class, age, and education level. The other attributes that were not specifically mentioned do matter but have much less of an impact on my project. The last main stakeholder is the people that I am interviewing. Most of the descriptor variables apply but very indirectly. These are the attributes that are ranked from most important to least important: personality traits, attitude, interests, values, and lifestyle.
I will validate my project through small scale experiments that emulate the project. I will use my social connections to gather people that are willing to participate in the project. I will also use the internet to gather useful information about my project and to find similar studies. This will allow me to successfully and efficiently complete my project. Since there is nothing physical coming from the project; the paper will be the use of the project. The goal of the project is to educate people.
An example of something interesting that I learned from a friend is that in Europe many people write the date as day-month-year.
Another example of something interesting that I learned from a friend is that tipping a waiter is only common in America.
The last example of something interesting that I learned from a friend is that the work culture in the USA is much different than around the world. In the united states, everyone is working a lot more with fewer breaks.

How will I gather my data?
Should I make my data gathering criteria more specific?
How can my project directly benefit the community?
How do I spread the word and get people to read my paper?
Will there be any cons/negative affects linked to my study?
How will my experiment/project impact the community?
What types of interviews do I want to do?
Does my project differ from the way my fellow team members are conducting the research?
If so, how exactly is my project different?
If so, why did they decide to conduct the project differently and is it more efficient than the way I’m currently completing the project?
How long should the interviews be?
Can my data be quantified?
Should my data be quantified?
Will my project inspire more similar research?
Will my research only be applicable in the USA?
Does the internet/social media have any tangible impact on the results of my study?
If so how and why?
How can it be quantified?
What can I conclude from my data?

Inputs: time, effort, expertise, and technology.
Activities: Asking college students 20 questions about higher education.
Outputs/Outcomes: The answers to the questions, the people I ask, a set of current data that may be quantifiable, and my opinion-based paper.
Impact: the educated individuals and the informed decisions they make.
Goals: to educate the population more about higher education.
M&E Plan: The number of people that I interview is the metric of success. The people that read my paper.
Short term success is the people that I interview which can be quantified.
Long term success is the people that read my paper which I cannot quantify.

Many social factors go into my project. Since culture is directly affected by culture; culture will affect the majority of my project. The project aims to do research via ethnographical methods. This means that the culture that I am apart of also has an impact on the results from the research. This will be the types of questions I ask people. For example, based on my prior experiences I may ask people about their parents and how they have affected people’s decisions about higher education. This is because generally in Hispanic culture parents have more influence on their children. Since my project is based in America, I feel like there are not huge differences in a culture like in GSIF. This can make pointing out cultural differences and their effects more difficult but, because of this, the effects of culture will be more subtle. What I wanted to focus on that included culture was online culture and how people’s online presence affects their decisions and viewpoints about higher education. Currently, I still need to decide on what questions I want to ask so the effect of culture is a bit hard to predict at the moment.
I have experienced a few of these situations by myself. For example, when I was applying to colleges my parents tried to force me to apply only to schools in New York City. Although I have explicitly stated multiple times that I didn’t want to go to school in the city for various reasons. In the end, we ended up compromising with me applying to schools both in the city and out of the city. Since I am not a first-generation student my parents always expected me to go to college. Another example that I can think of is my friend John (not his real name since he doesn’t want people to know). When John was in high school both of his parents were illegal immigrants that split up. He felt the moral obligation to help his parents and his little sister out of poverty. Originally, he didn’t plan on going to college but since he had exceptional grades our guidance counselor basically forced him into applying to college. Now he is going to a 4-year cuny on a scholarship. The last example that shows cultural differences is when young adults are either charged money to live with their parents after a certain age or are kicked out, therefore, forcing them to make money. This places a much bigger burden on the young adult because they are suddenly thrusted into full adulthood with bills. Doing this as parents essentially stunts the career growth of the young adult.
I feel that since the problems are very ingrained in many cultures there may not be a simple cultural solution. The ways that I think we can improve this situation is with more education. Educating parents about the benefits and opportunities that college can lead to. Examples of this would be more community outreach. This would include programs to expose people to the idea of college. The main mistake that the current programs that already exist is that they focus on college and grades more than the individual. An example of this is finding out how to make college help you achieve your life goals instead of going to college because of societal pressure. Although this is not a complete solution it is a good start and with this start, it may inspire some people to at least consider college as an option.